Half of the of senior execs in German ministry were Nazis
A new report shows that every second senior executive in the Western Ministry of the Interior was a former National Socialist. Up to the 1960s, the number was even rising. Some of the employees were active Nazis but still worked in close contact with former victims of the Nazi regime.
What’s surprising is that East Germany, the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), also relied on former Nazi-party-members in its Ministry of the Interior. According to the study, numbers in the GDR were lower than in the West but still significant: Fourteen percent of executive positions in East Germany's Ministry of the Interior were held by former NSDAP members – despite the fact that the GDR proclaimed itself an anti-Fascist state.
Experience in the field
These numbers are all part of a preliminary report of a study that is currently being conducted by the German Institut für Zeitgeschichte München-Berlin and the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam. The institutes are looking at records from 1949 to 1970. Regarding West Germany, they observed that the number of former NSDAP-members working for the Ministry climbed up towards the beginning of the sixties – to the point that in 1961, they held two-thirds of leading positions in the authority. Towards the seventies, numbers decline again back to the 50 percent that the Ministry started out with.
Most of these people did not come directly from the Nazi “Reichsministerium”, as might be presumed. A huge part of them had however already gained professional experience in administrative or police work under the Nazis. The report states that this was one of the reasons they were hired in the first place – people with experience in this field were, according to the report, rare.
Not surprisingly, an important factor in employing these men and women was also networking relations. The report explicitly names former state secretary Hans Ritter von Lex and his associates, department heads Sklode von Perbandt and Erich Keßler, as being influential in the Western ministry’s recruiting process.
Manifestations: Consequences of the employments
Being a member of the NSDAP was not mandatory in the thirties. It was a voluntary act that included handing in a personally signed application. While some of the individuals employed in the ministry might have been more passive party-members, others were actively engaged in Nazi rule and terror, being considered “NS-offenders” by the report. In some cases, these employees even worked in close contact with former victims of the Nazi-regime.
Being mentally linked to the Nazi ideology did not simply vanish in these employees after 1945, which manifested itself even in the Ministry’s political stance at the time. According to the report, anti-Semitic positions still influenced the part of the ministry that was responsible for foreigners and residential questions. Certain censorship practices still prevailed in the cultural department, and the social department was determined by social-conservative values regarding state welfare.
Other ministries, similar stories
The entire study will be completed in 2018, shedding even more insight into the matter. It will focus more on the individual employees’ involvement in the Nazi regime, and also on the question to what extent these involvements influenced the ministries’ political moves.
The study was commissioned eleven months ago by German Minister of the Interior Thomas de Maizière, who said: “It is only when we know our past that we can judge contemporary developments and sculpt our future in a responsible way”.
The Ministry of the Interior took its sweet time to take that step: German Ministries of Justice, Finance and the Foreign Office already commissioned surveys years ago. According to the new discoveries, the Western German Ministry of the Interior now holds an unfortunate leading position among them in employing former NSDAP-members.
The report by the Institut fuer Zeitgeschichte can be downloaded in German here .
